If you didn’t get a Chick tract in your Halloween pillowcase this year, I’ve got you covered. I read Jack Chick’s The Crusaders #1 over at 1-900-HOT-DOG (and its Patreon). The Crusaders was Jack Chick’s first full-sized and full-length comic book. I grew up Catholic—definitely too Catholic, if you had to suffer through my company in high school and college—so I was used to both Chick tracts and their very deluded view on Roman Catholicism as a kid. The added hilarity, in a “laugh so you don’t scream forever” way, is just how much actual criminal activity the Catholic Church was guilty of in perpetuity while Chick was convinced they were involved in the lesser crimes of Satanic Illuminati conspiracy.
This issue the villain is the atheist and anti-religious USSR, which serves up special combo #3 in your Jack Chick evangelical themes menu: Persecution Complex. In these pages we meet The Crusaders, even though nobody calls them that and they’re not on a crusade so much as a supply run. Thrill as they visit Latvia, elude Soviet spies without realizing, escape a completely different middling-stakes trap than their mission, and lure an exploited woman to her death. Fun times in the ’70s!